News

Coffee Toolkit integrates women and youth into all stages of the value chain

November 7, 2014

The first gender inclusion toolkit for the coffee sector has been released today, a joint collaboration between the Sustainable Coffee Programme, Hivos and Agri-Pro-Focus, to address the inequalities that women and youth in the coffee supply chain experience in terms of access to training, land ownership, inputs and income. These constraints create a generation unmotivated to remain in coffee farming, which poses a great threat to coffee production as a whole.

Therefore, Hivos and its partners have produced this toolkit to provide practical guidance and tools that will motivate and assist coffee roasters and traders to take an inclusive approach to developing better functioning coffee chains so as to benefit men and women of different age groups equally. The toolkit synthesises the contents of gender-focused manuals, including those produced by USAID, Enclude, GALS, ILO, Care and others, into a compendium of knowledge and best practices. It was not created as a blueprint, but rather as a range of tools that can be customised.

Ted van der Put, programme director at the Sustainable Trade Initiative IDH, says, “Sustainable development of the coffee sector, especially in smallholder-dominated production systems, is often hampered by unequal distribution of information, labour, and other resources and benefits within coffee farming families. We anticipate that the use of this toolkit will be instrumental in tackling these issues by enabling both public and private entities to provide relevant and more effective services to farming families involved in the coffee supply chain”.

Catherine van der Wees, Green Entrepreneurship programme officer at Hivos, confirms that “a fruitful coffee sector needs women and men of all age groups to blossom”.

Launches of the the coffee toolkit are planned at the following events in the fourth quarter of 2014 and first quarter of 2015:

Coffee Fair- Addis Ethiopia Women in Coffee Event 5 November 2014

ISEAL Gender in standards and certification – London UK- 7 November 2014